This little philosophy lecture is
about right and wrong with respect our coalition government, and this St.
Paul's Cathedral occupation, and a few other things. So I better start by
saying what the principle of right and wrong is according to me. It's the
Principle of Humanity. That's the principle of the Left in politics when it is
true to itself. In brief it is that we must get and keep people out of lives of
deprivation and suffering -- out of what you can call bad lives.

Bad lives are lives denied or
deprived of the great human goods, frustrated in the fundamental desires of our
human nature. These six great goods or desires are for a decent length of
conscious life, bodily well-being, kinds of freedom and power, respect and
self-respect, the goods of relationship, and such goods of culture as literacy
and religion.

The Principle of Humanity, fully
stated, is as follows.The
right thing -- action, practice, institution, government, society, possible
world -- is the one that according to the best judgement and information at the
time is the rational one in the sense of of being effective and not
self-defeating with respect to one end -- the end of getting andkeeping people out of bad lives.

No metaphor there, no cant about The
Big Society or undefined fairness or anything else, no stuff from the Creative
Department of your party ad agency. No lowering of the level of intelligence of
our public discourse. The Principle of Humanity does have a policy of clear
grown-up honesty in it. Also a policy of useful equalities, and more.

What is the tradition of
conservatism's principle of right and wrong? And what is the principle of
liberalism, always a little namby pamby but at the moment certainly
demonstrating half its reality, the lower half? Conservatives used to say they
were against change but for reform, which they never distinguished. Even their
main thinker Edmund Burke didn't do it. Anyway they're not against change when
it suits them, as Thatcherism and the present covert moves against the National
Health Service demonstrate.

They used to say they were against
too much democracy. Now they say they're for our hierarchic democracy, which is
very short on equality and therefore freedom. But they're also against even
hierarchic democracy when it suits them, as with the idea of the Greek prime
minister the other week to let the Greek people speak. But I skip the rest of a
lot of hopeless answers to what conservatism is.

I suppose the best candiate for
conservatism's general principle of right and wrong is desert -- everybody to
get what he deserves. Bonuses, time in jail, education, and so on. In fact, I'd
say, conservatives getting the things they want and others getting the things
they don't want.The bankers and corporation leaders must be paid those
millions of pounds annually because they deserve it. There is also the not
always hidden convention that those who are badly off really deserve their
poverty, ignorance and the rest.

That talk isn't a clear general
principle of desert, which is certainly needed, for consistency for a start.
I'll be coming back to the matter of whether there is such a clear general
principle. Right now, we may agree that any talk of desert has a lot to do with
the subject of freedoms or rather mainly one freedom.

There are two general ideas of
freedom. One, the idea of voluntariness, is being able to decide and do what
you want. You are not compelled or constrained to decide and do what you don't
want. The paradigm and traditional case of lack of this freedom of
voluntariness is being in jail.

The second idea of freedom is
origination, one thing meant by elevated talk of free will. What it comes to is
that you were able to decide otherwise than you did at a time, no matter your
entire situation including your brain at the time and in the past. Your
decision and hence your action were just not caused. Still, your decision was
not a random or chance event either, but one under a kind of personal control.
That has control has been spoken of in terms of what is surely the nonsense of
self-causation, but never ever explained.

What conservatives and others say
you deserve is typically attached to what you have freely done in the sense of
origination. You get more of something, say richness or poverty, on account of
your originations as distinct from your voluntarinesses.

That brings up determinism. For a
start, we all know an event that is an effect is one that comes from a cause,
say striking a match, and also other necessary conditions of the effect. The
whole set of conditions makes up a causal circumstance. The causal circumstance
guarantees the effect, which means that the effect would still have happened
whatever else had accompanied the whole causal circumstance. Causal
circumstances and effects form causal sequences or chains for final events.

One philosophical and scientific
theory of determinism is that all events of human consciousness, notably our
decisions and formings of intentions, and all our actions, are effects of
causal sequences, going back to before any consciousness relevant to the
decision. You hear that determinism has been refuted by interpretations of the
mathematics of theories in contemporary physics. But the interpretations of the
theories, to speak plainly, are a mess, including self-contradiction.
Physicists even admit the mess, sometimes under the guise of celebrating what
they call the weirdness and mystery of nature. No doubt they'll be able to
admit more now that the sacred proposition of physics, that nothing goes faster
than light, seems not to be true in Switzerland and Italy.

I don't try to push down your throat
what I do believe, which is the truth of determinism. I do put it to you that
all of us, when we think about choices and actions, are very ready to grant
something like determinism -- you can't make your past unreal, or your present.
We believe what you can call near-determinism. But despite this we are ready to
half-accept anyway that there is not only voluntariness but something like
origination and desert, in the lives of the rich and the poor.

There can be no origination if
determinism is true -- which I sure take it to be. So there can't be any of the
desert that is tied to origination -- as against the credit and the useful
basis for judgement and so on that attaches to voluntariness, in connection
with punishment and a lot more. Why then are we ordinarily inclined to believe
in origination? Half-believe in it and desert?

Why do some of us at least talk as
if origination exists and so punishment is richly deserved -- more of it than
for voluntariness? Maybe there is a root of these mistakes in human nature, the
history of the species. But there is another fair-sized root right here in
contemporary society, any way in England and America. I have the idea that
maybe we imbibe or are taught the stuff because it has been and is useful to
some of us. Ideas and desires kept going with an intention even if not really a
plot or a conspiracy.

Come back to the question of whether
there really is a clear general principle of desert for conservatism. There are
an awful lot of reasons for saying no. Let me mention just one. What does it
usually mean to say something is deserved? It means it's right. The principle
of desert comes down to saying a thing is right because it is right.

The short story
of conservatism, though, is not that it is just self-interested. We're all
self-interested. The short story of conservatism is that it has no principle of
right and wrong to support its self-interest, unlike the Left in politics,
which has the Principle of Humanity. The shortest story of conservatism is just
that it is what is properly called selfish rather than just self-interested. If
I'm allowed a little traditional thinking, it's a kind of class-selfishness.

It's
now being covertly defended in England by the coalition government, the new
Teletubbies, new characters of kiddie television for voters. Tinky Winky,
Dipsy, Laa-Laa, and Po. There they are, making funny noises and uttering things
in their baby-langauge, and getting messages from somewhere, just like the
originals. They also have those other names but they're not really needed.
Cameron, Clegg, Osborne, Cable. But I better stop. We're serious around here.
I'll try anyway.

I asked a little way back why our
societies tend to believe in the funny freedom of origination as distinct from
the plain freedom of voluntariness. Why is there that background social fact?
One part of the plain answer is that the attitude is promoted by conservatism,
in its own interest. The background social fact is partly owed to to the
selfishness of the tradition of conservatism. It helps to get them what they
want for themselves.

So inhumanity is what conservatism
is, the very opposite of the Principle of Humanity. Take the current economic
situation in Britain as an example. There is no need at all to be baffled by
the economics. Our economists have done more than ever before to earn for
themselves the well-known name of their calling -- the dismal science. They
can't speak English. We can.

The simple fact is that we have a
national deficit. The state has been spending more money than it is getting in.
Therefore it has a choice. It can increase its income or reduce its spending.
The government's policy is not to try to increase its income, by the means of
taxation of the better-off, including stopping the evasion. Its policy is
reducing its spending, by taking away from the badly-off. In my view, a
government could not be more vile. It could not be more unlike the head of a
decent family. This government is a few vicious members of a family.

It is
humanity that this occupation of St. Paul's serves. It is inhumanity that it
has the great honour to resist. Every professor in England should be here in
your University Tent and in your main assembly supporting you. Do you wonder if
the coalition government will maintain a respectability when it is gone, have a
decent place in history? It will not. You will have such a place, as certainly
as one is had now by those who have resisted inhumanity thoughout history.
You're not the kiddies.You have a rank above money-grubbers, the political
class, right-wing historians, the lesser press, the Teletubbies, and all that.

Your
civil disobedience is what is morally necessary, as are further gestures of it.
Maybe one by another English army colonel today, true to Colonel Rainborough of
the Civil War? Rainborough said, you'll remember, "For really I think the
poorest he hath a life to live, as the greatest he...." Maybe a tank in
Parliament Square to support the big strike or the march? No shells in the
colonel's tank. After the telly arrives, back to barracks in Pimlico to accept
the penalty for his civil and military disobedience.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/professor-ted-honderich

Ted Honderich's relevant books: How Free Are You? The
Determinism Problem (Oxford University Press); Punishment: The Supposed
Justifications Revisited (Pluto Press); Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist
War (Continuum) in the U.S. titled Right and Wrong etc (Seven
Stories Press); Conservatism: Burke, Nozick, Bush, Blair? (Pluto Press);
On Political Means and Social Ends (Edinburgh University Press). Long
and academic book: A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience, and
Life-Hopes (Oxford University Press). Papers and talks at Ted Honderich
website: http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/